Women\u27s Experience of Infertility: A Multi-systemic Perspective

This article describes a study that used a multi-system perspective to document the self-reported experience of women struggling with infertility and its treatment. A sub-sample of 56 participants from a parent study that examined posttraumatic growth in the context of infertility was used based on their answers to a single open-ended question about their infertility experience, which was included in the original questionnaire. Inclusion criteria were self-identified failure to achieve a pregnancy or carry it to term after at least one year of trying in the six years prior to the study and absence of a recent crisis unrelated to the infertility. Responses were content analyzed independently by a team of three researchers. The analysis yielded agreed upon 85 codes clustered in six themes: Challenges, perception of the experience, reactions, support, coping strategies and posttraumatic growth. The main overall finding points to the sense of being “trapped” in a web of multi-faceted, environmental and internal relationships between diverse systems involved in the infertility treatment. Implications for practice are identified and directions for future research suggested